Miranda July
We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.Collection: Long
Most great filmmakers are good at place. Like how people say, like, "The city itself is a character in the movie," you know? I'm so interior. I always forget there's such a thing as an exterior wide shot, where you can see where someone is. As opposed to just: how can we show what this person is thinking, in an abstract way that is felt?Collection: Character
Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.Collection: Inspirational
It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.Collection: Vigilance
That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I'm being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea I suck it down as if I'm in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest.Collection: Drinking
For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.Collection: Girl
If you want to have a character who falls into crisis, all you have to do is turn the Internet off, and then we all understand how that feels, when you suddenly just have time and yourself.Collection: Fall
You've got the people you know, which are problematic. Always. They're rich but they're also real people living their lives alongside you. Then you've got the people that you make-up completely, who are often missing a dimension if they don't have some reference to real people. So strangers exist in this in-between space, where in not knowing them, you are creating a fiction for them, even in passing, but at the same time, there they are, with their actual bodies and their actual clothes. It's totally enticing.Collection: Real
To get anything done, you used to have to brush past, or at least lay eyes on, someone whose reality was totally different from your own. That used to be inevitable. If that goes away because everything's so convenient, everything's brought to you, well, then there goes one of my favorite parts of life, and something that I've gone out of my way to court.Collection: Eye
I guess like any writer or screenwriter I'm alone in my own world so much of the time that I'm often trying to force myself out of my world. Into more risk. A less controlled kind of inspiration. I'm so keenly aware of how easy it's getting to not leave the house, with Amazon, especially.Collection: Inspiration
I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.Collection: Writing
My way into making movies - into making things is general - has been through performing.Collection: Way
I can't imagine being invested in someone else's script.Collection: Scripts
My ideal life is just lounging around the house and every once in a while I'll kind of write something, and then I'll leave and eat something and masturbate or whatever - just this very fluid life of comforting myself.Collection: Writing
I am very sincere. Some people are always kidding, so when you're not, it's going to seem annoying to them.Collection: People
I don't tally the world, asking, "Would this annoy you? Would this annoy you?" That's so far removed from where I'm at when I'm in the trenches struggling with how to express things that I don't fully understand myself.Collection: Struggle
If you read my short stories, there's a lot of sex in those in all different ways. To me, it's a really good, useful thing to get to have in a story. And in a movie, it's amazing, because you actually get to show things.Collection: Sex
The life you live in front of an audience is like an altered state - it's not totally real. I'm always, even in the course of one day, trying to find ways to balance both sides.Collection: Real
I can guarantee you nothing I do is a conscious attempt to inject something in.Collection: Guarantees
So the recordings were these immersive landscapes, and yet, unlike the performances that almost no one would see, I had a sense that these could live forever. I was just starting to get my head around the democratic aspect of art; I didn't want to make rarefied things that were either alienatingly obscure or elite and art-worldy, so a recording that anyone could buy was a great medium.Collection: Art
Somewhat predictably, I'm much more comfortable in front of an audience - and a big audience is even better - than faced with one stranger. This always seems like a bit of a failing on my part, as a human. I think that's also why I put myself situations where I'm forced to engage in other ways.Collection: Thinking
As a woman filmmaker it's pretty important that you have some basis of confidence that you're coming from, because, as I got closer to LA, there's less and less women. There's less and less mirrors for who you are.Collection: Mirrors
The level of control, that's part of what's so appealing about filmmaking - you have so much control over what the reader, the viewer, is noticing from moment to moment. They can't do that boring boring boring thing as easily.Collection: Levels
When you're trying to create something and you need to hang out, in not knowing, in all the cracks and spaces where you feel lost, and you need to endure them, and have new ideas come out of that emptiness, well, the Internet is what we do when we feel lost, you know? Like, you go online or you check your email when you don't know what to do next, and so it's not helpful, in that sense.Collection: Ideas
I suppose the daily disciplines are just a reflection of the qualities of my inner world - a mixture of paralysis and terror and a lighter, freer, kind of rebellious woman. So those are just constantly pushing against each other, and that's played out in every area of my life.Collection: Reflection
A more normal, mature way to think about it [my work] would be, Oh, I work on multiple projects at once and they overlap, but the actual psychology of it is a lot more self-abusing.Collection: Thinking
The whole thing of working in all these different mediums, it's just so that I can always be playing hooky from one of them. I can always be rebelling against my boss. Like, I'm supposed to be writing this book, but - heh heh heh - I'm writing a movie, secretly. I'm procrastinating, and in my off-hours I'm working on this movie that I'm not allowed to do, because I'm supposed to be writing a book!Collection: Book
I'm always just trying to get the work done so that I can be free - like, with the sense that, like, the real me has no interest in this? I just gotta do it for my boss. But the catch is that I'm never free, I never finish the work, so I don't know who this freewheeling employee with extracurricular interests is.Collection: Real
The thing I am most interested in is power relations - it is so easy in a relationship like that [of an artist and a gallery manager], to imagine that the other person is living a perfect life.Collection: Perfect
Narrative and characters have always interested me. I never tried to alienate an audience. Of course, gradually, I wanted a bigger and bigger space to draw people in, so it's very organic [growth].Collection: Character
I'm always the kind of friend or girlfriend who suggests, when there's some cataclysmic problem in the relationship, I'm like, "Well, maybe we can come up with a creative activity that will help us out." I'm like, "Let's get out the pens! Draw a picture of how much you hate me!"Collection: Girlfriend
To do someone else's script? I don't think I'd have a reason.Collection: Thinking
I like embracing kind of normal forms but am always trying to approach them as if no one's ever done that before. As if I'm literally the first person to ever write a book.Collection: Book
Thus far, everything I've made has come out of my really feeling it, out of the fire of my life.Collection: Fire
I wrestle my fears with every big decision I make. Ultimately, maybe all that wrestling does is make you sick of your own thoughts, and so with nothing resolved you just go ahead and have unprotected sex. The moment I became pregnant, everything became out of gait. None of those fears seem relevant in the same way, and that's so like life, that once you do the daring move you're in a totally different landscape. Now it's a new story.Collection: Sex
I'm interested in what the virtues of all those things are, especially for the kind of person who's made their own world that revolves around them, like writers do. It seems especially precious.Collection: World
There's always the sense that you should strike while the iron's hot and while there are all these opportunities, but that's not the way I get ideas. It has to be more organic, building up through living and through experiencing things.Collection: Opportunity
I mean obviously we're all dealing with a lot more strangers due to the web. I'd say it has more to do with the quality of interactions. When you're physically interacting with someone, it forces you to be more present and probably a little more uncomfortable. You have to tolerate being outside the comfort of your own home.Collection: Home
When you're not doing fiction, there's a limit to how much illustrating you can do with your work. I mean, you can do fine. There are great non-fiction writers, but people aren't necessarily going to say anything that reveals them as much as a picture might. Even their surroundings, in lot of cases, the things that meant the most to me were the things I noticed in their houses. I was always looking, as much as I was listening to them. I was looking around for clues as to why I was there.Collection: Mean
I moved his hair out of his face. I put my hand under his nose and felt gentle, even breaths. I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered again, It’s not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told.Collection: Hands
There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost.Collection: World
People tend to stick to their own size group because it's easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you.Collection: Sexy
There's all different kinds of people, but I don't think it's that unusual that once you get like a little power, you get to do your weird thing even more.Collection: Thinking
I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about any of it.Collection: Okay
Collections are certainly abundant online. It's complicated, because it's not like these people didn't want computers, although there was some nonchalance about it. I would sometimes ask the people I interviewed if they wished they had a computer, and in a lot of cases, it was like they couldn't process the question. You don't know what you don't have, I guess.Collection: People
I've always been terrified of getting used to something that is actually killing me-a relationship or a job. But in those cases, you can count on a friend to say something. The Internet is different, because all my friends are in the same relationship.Collection: Jobs
Since I started making art, I've always had some kind of project that was really about and for other people, because I think I just need that balance to feel sane myself — you know?Collection: Art
Live the dream, Potato.Collection: Dream
Making a movie: It's so hard. It's the hardest of all the things I do.Collection: Hardest